Where Is Jennifer Pan's Ex-Boyfriend Daniel Wong Now? All About His Prison Sentence
Daniel Wong's involvement in Jennifer Pan's plot to murder her parents is covered in Netflix's documentary 'What Jennifer Did'
Jennifer Pan and Daniel Wong are in the headlines yet again as Netflix revisits their chilling murder plot in What Jennifer Did.
The Netflix documentary released on April 10 recounts the case of Pan, a young Canadian woman who was convicted of hiring hitmen to kill her parents. After the attack, Pan’s mother Bich Ha Pan died, while Pan’s father Huei Hann Pan survived his injuries.
As the case unfolded, so did Pan’s tangled web of lies. Not only did she lie to her parents about her relationship with Wong, but she also lied about her education, telling her parents she was attending the University of Toronto when she was actually living with Wong and his family.
When her parents discovered the truth, they kept her under close supervision, confiscating her phone and laptop, and forbade her from seeing Wong.
As a result, Pan and Wong allegedly plotted to kill both of her parents for her $500,000 share of their estate. Both Pan and Wong, along with their co-conspirators, were sentenced to prison for their roles in the crime.
Here’s everything to know about Wong’s crimes and his current whereabouts.
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How did Daniel Wong meet Jennifer Pan?
According to Toronto Life, Pan and Wong first met in high school when they were both involved in band. Though they initially started as friends, their relationship turned into something more after their school band took a trip to Europe in 2003.
After Pan experienced an asthma attack following one of the performances, Wong helped cal her down outside, according to one of their classmates. “He pretty much saved my life,” Pan later said, according to the publication. “It meant everything.”
They began dating that summer but kept their relationship a secret from her parents. However, Pan’s lies slowly began to unravel as time went by. Under a tremendous amount of pressure from her mom and dad to maintain her grades, Pan doctored her report cards to show that she was a straight-A student and later falsified her high school diploma when she failed calculus and couldn't graduate.
After faking an acceptance letter from Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), Pan kept the ruse going as she pretended to attend classes, when in actuality she was working at a restaurant where Daniel was a kitchen manager as well as teaching piano lessons.
Two years later, she lied to her parents again and told them she was accepted into the University of Toronto's pharmacology program, which would require her to stay at a female friend’s house three nights a week to cut down on her commuting time. The truth was that she was staying at Wong's house with his family.
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When did Daniel Wong and Jennifer Pan break up?
Wong and Pan’s relationship later hit a breaking point when her parents became suspicious about her volunteer work at a hospital blood testing lab. After confronting her about the situation, Pan broke down and told them the truth, including that she had been staying with Wong. Her father was furious, telling her to leave their house, but Pan’s mother convinced him to let her stay.
They retaliated by taking away her cell phone and laptop for two weeks and forbidding her from seeing Wong again. She did continue to see him, but Wong grew tired of their secret romance and broke off their relationship.
According to Toronto Life, she then learned that Wong was seeing another girl named Christine. In an attempt to split up Wong and Christine, Pan falsely claimed to Wong that Christine had sent her "warnings ... to leave Daniel alone," per the Toronto Life, which, she claimed, included a gang-rape by a group of men at her house and a bullet sent to her mailbox.
What crimes did Daniel Wong commit?
In the spring of 2010, Pan began to seriously consider murdering her parents. Through a former classmate, she was introduced to Ricardo Duncan, to whom Pan claims she gave $1,500 to kill her father. (Duncan denied Pan’s claims in court, saying that while Pan asked him to kill her parents, he refused, the Toronto Star reported. He was never prosecuted in connection with the murder plot.)
Around this same time, Wong and Pan began communicating again, and together they allegedly began to devise a plan to hire a professional hitman to kill her parents in order to receive her $500,000 share of their estate. According to Toronto Life, Wong enlisted an acquaintance named Lenford Crawford to kill her parents for $10,000.
Days before the attack took place, Wong reportedly began to have a change of heart. According to Toronto Life, he texted Pan, telling her “he felt as strongly about Christine as she did about him.” She then told him to call off the hit on her parents, to which Wong replied, “I thought you wanted this for you?” After some back and forth, Wong let Pan know the murder plot was still in motion, replying, “I did everything and lined it all up for you,” per Toronto Life.
On Nov. 8, 2010, Crawford's friend David Mylvaganam and two other men, all armed with guns, entered Pan’s home through the front door. They rounded up Pan’s parents, took them to the basement downstairs and covered their heads with blankets before shooting them. Pan’s father was shot in the shoulder and face while her mother was shot in the head three times, killing her instantly. Wong and Crawford were not present at the crime, CBC reported.
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When was Daniel Wong arrested?
As Pan was brought in for questioning over the course of the next few weeks, police began to notice several holes in her story. Eventually, things became clearer when her father awoke from a medically-induced coma on Nov. 12, 2010. At that time, he told police that Jennifer had seemed friendly with the intruders, and they had not tied her up during the invasion (a story which differed from the one she had told police).
According to Toronto Life, Pan eventually broke down to the police, alleging that the tragic event was a suicide attempt gone wrong. She claimed that she had paid the intruders $2,000 to kill her, but that they'd killed her mother and shot her father instead.
Following the Nov. 22, 2010 interrogation, Pan was arrested. By the spring of 2011, Wong was connected to the shooting— along with Crawford, Mylvaganam and the driver Eric Carty — based on cell phone calls and texts.
They were all arrested and charged with first-degree murder, attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
What was Daniel Wong’s sentence?
The trial began on March 19, 2014, in Newmarket, Ontario, Canada. The trial lasted almost 10 months, with over 50 witnesses on both sides, including Pan’s father, who testified against her.
The trial ended in 2015, with Wong and Pan both sentenced to two terms of life in prison with no parole for 25 years — one for her mother's murder and one for the attempted murder of her father.
During proceedings, Pan’s father obtained a restraining order for him and his son Felix, prohibiting Pan from contacting them ever again. The order was granted by a judge, which also banned Pan from ever contacting Wong again, per Medium.
Where is Daniel Wong now?
According to a former classmate of Wong’s, who visited him in prison in 2014 and wrote about the encounter for Toronto Life, he is at a correctional facility in Lindsay, Ontario, Canada.
The reporter said they asked Wong if he ever wondered about how he might have done things differently, to which Wong replied that the best thing for him was to focus on reality: that he was in jail, and he had to make the best of it.
In May 2023, Pan and Wong, along with the other co-conspirators, were granted an appeal for their first-degree murder charges. According to the CBC, the Court of Appeal for Ontario found that the original trial judge made an error in not giving the jury verdict options for second-degree murder and manslaughter in the case. The court upheld all of the group's other convictions.
According to the Markham Economist & Sun, the case is currently being reviewed by the Canadian Supreme Court, which will decide whether the case will get a new trial.
If the case doesn’t get a new trial, Wong, Pan and the others will be eligible for parole after 25 years after their sentencing.
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